Madison Map
Wisconsin's capital was laid out on a neck of land barely half a mile wide, with a lake on either side and the Capitol on the high point in the middle.
Where is Madison?
Madison is in south-central Wisconsin, about 80 miles west of Milwaukee on Interstate 94 and roughly 150 miles northwest of Chicago. Minneapolis is some 270 miles to the northwest. The original plat was squeezed onto the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, with the State Capitol on the high point in the middle and the University of Wisconsin campus running west along the Mendota shore.
Madison at a glance
| State | Wisconsin |
| County | Dane County |
| Population | 285,300 (2024 Census estimate) |
| Rank among US cities | No. 77 of the 100 largest |
| Time zone | Central Time |
| Region | Midwest (East North Central division) |
Madison in Wisconsin
Madison is the seat of Dane County, the fastest-growing of Wisconsin's 72 counties — the Wisconsin county map shows how much of the state is rural by comparison. It is the capital, but not the largest city: Milwaukee, on Lake Michigan, is bigger. Wisconsin puts no other city on the national top-100 list, and the Wisconsin state page explains how the population thins out north of them. Madison keeps Central Time along with the rest of the state.
Four lakes and the Yahara River
The lakes are the geography. The Yahara River strings four of them together — Mendota, Monona, Waubesa and Kegonsa — before draining south to the Rock River and eventually the Mississippi. All four are glacial: the last ice sheet stopped a short distance west of here, and the ridged, pitted country around the city is the debris it left behind. Drive an hour southwest and the landscape changes completely into the Driftless Area, unglaciated hill country the ice never reached. Within the city, the isthmus is barely more than half a mile wide in places, which is why Madison's traffic funnels through so few streets, and why the Capitol and the university campus ended up less than a mile apart on the same narrow strip of ground.
Cities near Madison
The nearest large cities are Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis and, further south, St. Louis. Madison is the smaller of Wisconsin's two entries among the hundred largest cities, and the Midwest region page sets the state beside the rest of the Great Lakes and plains country.